This is the joint website of Women Against Rape and Black Women's Rape Action Project. Both organisations are based on self-help and provide support, legal information and advocacy. We campaign for justice and protection for all women and girls, including asylum seekers, who have suffered sexual, domestic and/or racist violence.

WAR was founded in 1976. It has won changes in the law, such as making rape in marriage a crime, set legal precedents and achieved compensation for many women. BWRAP was founded in 1991. It focuses on getting justice for women of colour, bringing out the particular discrimination they face. It has prevented the deportation of many rape survivors. Both organisations are multiracial.

In the Media

The conviction of a 16-year-old girl for falsely claiming she was raped has caused alarm among campaigners
• Steven Morris
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 28 January 2011 18.15 GMT

She should have been in a classroom working towards her GCSE exams, making sure she achieves the grades she needs to study photography at college.

Instead after a gruelling three-day trial the teenager found herself in front of a judge being convicted of falsely claiming that she was raped last summer when she was just 15.

The case has caused alarm among anti-rape campaigners and legal experts who believe it is yet another example of the increasing readiness of the police and the Crown Prosecution Service to pursue women – or in this case a girl – who in their eyes falsely claim rape.

Many women in both Sweden and Britain will wonder at the unusual zeal with which Julian Assange is being pursued for rape allegations (Report, 8 December). Women in Sweden don't fare better than we do in Britain when it comes to rape. Though Sweden has the highest per capita number of reported rapes in Europe and these have quadrupled in the last 20 years, conviction rates have decreased. On 23 April 2010 Carina Hägg and Nalin Pekgul (respectively MP and chairwoman of Social Democratic Women in Sweden) wrote in the Göteborgs-Posten that "up to 90% of all reported rapes never get to court. In 2006 six people were convicted of rape though almost 4,000 people were reported". They endorsed Amnesty International's call for an independent inquiry to examine the rape cases that had been closed and the quality of the original investigations.

Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions, has ordered a change in the way in which rape claim retraction cases are dealt with.

The director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer, has ordered a change in the way government lawyers deal with cases against women who withdraw rape claims, acknowledging "failings" in the handling of a recent victim.

In his first public statement since a woman was freed from jail last month after being convicted of perverting the course of justice for retracting a rape claim, the chief prosecutor in England and Wales has said that from now on, similar cases will require his personal approval.